The Path You Tread Is Narrow
by The Voice in the Wilderness
Summary: ... and the drop is sheer and very high. Very AU dark smut. Teen!Rin by the way, I do not do Loli or Shouta. Even I have my limits. Inspired by Tanith Lee's "Fleur De Feu" short story, though nothing is stolen from it.


_All "InuYasha" characters belong to Rumiko Takahashi and associated copyright holders. No money is being made from this fan fiction. No infringement is intended. The title is gleefully stolen from the Pink Floyd song "Cymbaline". it is not my own creation.  
_

"Take it down."

Small white fingers creep in a foggy daze toward the small tie holding up the thick wayward strands, slick and slippery – wet like their mistress. Finding purchase on the thin leather band the girl pulls her hair from its bonds on the side of her head, unflinching as the jet-colored strands plummet down her still face. Her deep brown eyes are locked in place by those before her. The deep rumble of command in those three words spoken to her as she lay her daily devotion of food and drink at the beast's feet made her heart twist in fright, joy, and… something else entirely. Something she didn't quite now how to describe.

She can barely see in the barn's close-slatted, dusty light. Stripes of milky gold light slash across thick bars of darkness and hide the long, tall figure she knows is before her… just out of reach. He has been there for over a week and only once did Rin catch a glimpse of the blood-stained white fingers, claw-tipped and stone-still as death. She has not been able to ferret out the full form of the strange being holed up in this dusty, grassy darkness but the rare times it has spoken to her when she has come, bearing food and drink like she would for any wounded animal, makes Rin believe that the being haunting her foster parent's barn is something dangerous, something secret and something she wants to _keep._

Possession blooms in her teenage heart, shot through her hot blood by her body's impetus to burn, to rage, to fuck – only the girl Rin knows none of this. She knows only that when the creature in this darkness, in her darkness commands her to do something, she will do it without question. Life has been long, far longer than her 15 years and so dull that she feels her soul is in danger of peeling like a sun burn. Nothing has ever happened to her, Rin – alone. She is always swept along by the actions and lives of others. Her parents' death happened around her toddler's head like a black snowstorm, a blizzard that once gone and thawed had revealed the entire landscape of her life scoured away. Buffeted by such ebbs and flows of anchorless existence, the thin dark girl has retreated from the world, losing herself in the wilds that surround her adopted farm and for lack of a better word – home.

~*~

But something happened a week ago and it happened just to _her_. Skulking around the hay maw, hunting for the hidden fluffy treasures of newly born feral kittens, the girl Rin found a dark, growling shape huddled in the very oldest stacks of moldering straw. The musty smell pinched at her nose and the timbre of the wheezing growl yanked hard on the brake lines of her lizard brain; the cave-girl within Rin would always know the sound of a wounded cornered cave-tiger. Not consciously knowing any better, the girl's iron soul would then clamp over her shivering skin and her watery stomach and allow her curiosity to get the inevitable better of her. After a few tentative steps forward in an attempt to see the creature in a better, closer light, Rin finally acknowledged the steady building threat of the deep rumbling growl. Standing as still as a statue, the nervous and yet not-nervous girl thought she could hear something very alien in such a powerful haunting sound. Laced in the creature's threat of imminent death, one so powerful it made her chest and the ancient wooden floor under her small feet rumble, was the hiss of agony, of pain.

Rin's heart was captured in the wounded beast's teeth from then on. She just didn't know it then.

She had tried to sneak out at sundown: after the chickens were fed and roosted, after the compost was slopped out to rot, after the dishes were done, Rin would try to take her wounded beast what meat scraps she could filch from the old collie that shared her benevolent keeper's hearts. The cracked clay bottom of a flower pot now had the various bits of pork, beef, and chicken from last week's meals in a strange diminutive charnel pile – one that had never been touched. The ubiquitous barn cats gave this end of the barn a very wide berth and so did the ants… as a matter of fact, this creature seemed to frighten off any other animal in a wide arc. The cats tried to pretend they weren't scared, but when she tried to pick one up and walk closer to the full, shifting, rumbling darkness, the tiny feline turned into a buzz saw and nearly took her hand off trying to get away.

The old steel mixing bowl with the dents in the side held water that did not appear to have ever been touched. Rin noticed these things sadly; she did not want the creature with the beautiful white hand to die. Its presence made her secretly _special_.

Yesterday, it had deigned to speak to her and she nearly fainted in fright and that…something else; the squeezing, unable-to-breathe feeling, that _really good_ feeling.

"I don't eat human food. Stop bringing me your scraps." the deep voice snarled in the very definition of derision and dismissal.

Rin's eyes flew wide at the bestial clip of fangs sliding along very human words. The voice slid down her spine like smoke to settle in her belly. She knew she wanted to hear it speak again – no she needed to hear it speak to her again. Just to her.

"I don't want you to die." She whispered, her eyes to the dusty floor where she noticed a lock of silver hair catching the late waxing sun. Rin's eyes were transfixed by the eerie shine, pink and watery with the end of the day that flowed down the long strands pooled on the somehow filthy barn floor. She watched as the beast moved within his cloak of shadow, drawing the shining lock of hair along in his unseen wake and suddenly wanted very much to touch it. Forgetting herself completely, the thin girl rushed forward on her knees and brushed the strands as they slithered from her sight into darkness.

They were cold, like water and heavy like silver. Rin knew she would have to make herself remember this moment forever, because she knew it would never come again. She had trespassed in some ultimate way against this phantom god and in the morning, it would have evaporated with the fog. The hissing snarl that accompanied its tiny captivity flew completely over her entranced head. Reaching her hand into darkness, Rin wanted only to hold that small stream of cool silver to her check, her lips. If the hair on this beast was so utterly beautiful, how otherworldly might its face be? She wanted to know, all of her wanted so very badly to know, to feel, to possess this incredible wonder that had limped into her mundane and very empty life.

She was very shocked at the face that then flew over her, driving her back from her innocent assault. Yellow eyes wide in a marble seraph face too symmetrical to be either human or beast – yet somehow, it was both. Dried blood marred its high pale cheeks, or were those slashes marks upon its skin like a tiger's stripes under its fur? Long scimitar fangs roared from its wide, perfect mouth – all framed by that winnowed silver halo of hair. Rin fell back, crab-walking out of harm's suddenly furious way and willed her hungry mind to take indelible snapshots. She did not ever want to forget that immaculate face, ever. She had to make it understand!

"I don't want you to die." she whispered again with a helpless whine.

"What do you know, girl? Your kind know nothing." It spat slowly back at her.

"My kind? I have no kind – I am only Rin. I have nothing, I am nothing – just Rin. Or I was… until I saw you, just now. What are you?", she slowly spoke, thinking and talking at the same time, trying to figure out what to say to make it stay, to make it come out of darkness. To make it come to her.

"I am Sesshoumaru – that is enough." The beast within its darkness sighed out with an exhaled growl it did not really mean. This girl's black eyes held no fear, no derision, no demands – only hunger, inborn confusion. For what, the demon wasn't quite sure. He'd never seen her like before now.

She turned the name over in her mind, forming it with her small pink tongue against the roof of her mouth. It was otherworldly, ethereal like the being before her. When she said it back at him – it must be a _him_, it had to be; she needed so badly for it to be so! – the syllables seemed to drop from her lips to tumble like tongues down the front of her thin shirt, across her flat maiden's belly and down against places that had only known her touch until now.

"Sesshoumaru… I don't want you-'', she whispered slowly as the beast before her cut her off.

"What _do_ you want?" The cough that racked the end of its impatient reply was not a hopeful sound at all.

This Rin's pale thin face, swallowed by her vast dark eyes was a transparent glass giving him a candid view of her lonely, longing heart. He imagined his heart looked very similar to hers, because regardless of the varying weight of centuries or years, the density of loneliness never changed. Something about his inner reflection in her deep dark eyes moved the demon Sesshoumaru's cold heart for the small girl before him who was such a pale contradiction – her body was doing its best to rip her heart away from his talons and yet she held her ground, her lonely soul calling out to his in such an elemental way that it would not be ignored.

"I don't know…" her thin brows knit fast over the endless depths of her eyes.

He snorted in derision for all things human until her heard the end of her declaration – then he _really_ looked at her.

"…but I really want you to help me find it."

Her eyes bugged out comically over her own very suggestive desire – was that what she truly meant to say? Was that what had fascinated her about this impossible creature? Was her life so empty up until now?

Not knowing she was missing anything had left her hungry for something to come scratching like a stray at her door. But even as young and innocent as she was, even Rin knew once something like that was said, it could never be undone.

"Come back here tomorrow at sundown."

She was nodding in agreement to anything, everything this beast demanded of her. She would bring it a saint's head on a platter if only it would command it.

"And girl –"

The shadows parted for a split second, revealing the god's visage to her aching eyes like a miracle. Cold golden eyes flashed the remnants of the day back at her in innate command – even light obeyed this creature's will it seemed! Was that a hint of a smile upon the moist pale perfection of its lips as it glanced down upon her awkwardly crouched form? Rin wanted so badly to believe it was so!

"Do not bring me any more food." The thick deep velvet of his voice stroked her ear and was gone. He had closed himself up like a fan.

~*~

She had always thought the hemlock trees outside her high bedroom window were ancient, now she wasn't so sure. The weight of years that swirled like fog around her beast, her Sesshoumaru – for so she now thought of the demon holding an exile's court in her barn – made these hitherto ancient trees seem like gawky adolescents. Rin lay in her thin single bed, the washed-out sheet with its well-worn and well-loved flowers a field, on which she lay and dreamed her simple, childish dreams, that was until recently.

A furious summer storm had blown through over a week ago and she remembered the lightening had made her whole body quiver with the heavy air's static electricity. She could still feel the cold wind begin to send the storm in hard against her; she could feel the pressure change around her like hands over her thin body. The humidity rose and flared out like hot, sweaty hands upon her skin, her arms, her thin hips, her budding breasts. She imagined as she relived this storm in her mind that he had come with the lightening, come for her. Her minds eye saw a tall, pale, imperious being whose cold lonely heart heard the call of her own and had come to claim it in fire, rain and pleasure. Rin squeezed her thighs together and arched her back as she imagined the way the lightening ran fast along his white skin as he slowly bared it to her hungry, frightened eyes. The imagined weight of his bare body over hers was making her heart race in her chest in such a delicious way! She bit her lip and touched herself, dreaming it was her demon lover whose hot, deadly hand was taking her pleasure as his own and leaving her soul bare before him. Feeling the phantom touch of hard lips against her sweaty neck, Rin made her body shiver and quake for her master's dread pleasure and when she bucked and came hard, her fallen angel's name flew from her quivering lips like a desperate prayer – one she heard over even the thunder-claps relived within her delirious mind.

"Sesshoumaru…!" she ground out and threw back her sweaty hair in the nestled darkness of her quiet room. The flowers upon her tangled sheet were sweat-slick and wet with desire.

Perched in the quiet resinous throne of hemlock, the spying demon was shocked to find that he was as well. The girl's passion had lit like a fire burning behind his eyes, and even as she was extinguished and fell into sated sleep, Sesshoumaru continued to burn, banking the embers of his heart in new-found jealousy. Alighting to the ground in effortless grace, the demon shook out his moonstruck hair and walked back to his dark den, speculating on what the cooling sweat on this little Rin's skin would taste like.

PART 2

"Not your hair, girl – your dress. Take it down." He growled out of his darkness.

Rin looked stupidly at her light cotton dress; would she do this? Would she cross this bridge, burning it behind her forever? Plucking at the small ribbon holding the suddenly heavy cloth closed above her thin chest, Rin chewed at her lip in serious contemplation.

She heard a rough snarl and then slowly the Beast emerged from his darkness.

Long pale hair framed the angelic face only this was the face of the Destroying Angel. There was no mercy and there was no room for regrets. She had begged his name to the night and he had heard her. Rin was so struck by her demon's outward perfection that she completely ignored the fact that he continued stalking towards her. She would have stood, lost in contemplation of her delirious fate, until her legs gave out had the demon Sesshoumaru not closed the dusty gap between them and brought her up hard from her musings.

The girl noted the large hand gripping her wrist was slashed by stripes; the same stripes flew fast like battle scars across the marble face looking hard down upon her, making him even more devastating; the marring of such silver and pale perfection made it so much more _real_ to her still-unbelieving eyes. Dropping those eyes in immediate relief, she had not truly believed this creature was real until he had touched her. Breath hitching in a sudden pant, Rin noted in a far-off way that even the demon's long pale feet were beautiful. She prayed for time to stop cold.

Sesshoumaru felt her heart hammer through his tight grip on her captive wrist and knew she was his. He had only to claim her as such and then he could go, back into the wilderness from whence he came. Her need summoned his own and he intended to sate his inner beast one way or the other; he would either fuck her or kill her. Either way, it was all the same to him.

Rin felt her wrist being pushed into her chest, slowly at first and then with undeniable strength. She wanted to stand before this mythic beast and bear herself before him. She wanted to rip off the fragile trappings of her unwanted human life and will herself to glow with feral hunger before the captor of her soul. But she also knew the time for any choice in the matter of her unveiling had flown. The glowing yellow eyes of the beast glared down at her from under perfect silver brows as he forced her slowly to back up.

He thought her body was a gorgeous contradiction, seemingly like everything else about her; it was both hard and soft, yielding and yet steadfast. They danced backwards slowly, he advanced with the darkness and she slipped away like the twilight sun. One silver and bare as the day he came into being, the other dark and covered like a hidden treasure that begged to be unwrapped.

Rin found a thick hardness behind her back and knew even before the splintery beam snatched at the fabric of her unwanted clothes that she was up against one of the master beams of the barn. And still the beast before her continued to push her wrist. If she didn't want her wrist broken or her breastbone cracked she had to move her arm upwards, so she did. Her deep dark eyes lost themselves in her lover's silver hair as it settled about his broad shoulders and spilling past the point where her eyes refused to go, however much she might crave the thing she knew grew there.

"Look at me.", the demon commanded in a hard voice as he pinned her hard against the thick beam.

He wanted to strip away all those layers of solitude and stillness. He wanted to bury himself suddenly within the girl and wear her like a second skin. But he knew what flowed through her mind, even now at the point of last conscious thought before the fire he knew would come to wipe her slate clean. She thought he was an angel, he thought she feared him now and like all deadly predators he would kill her if she fled from him. Tilting his head this way and then that, Sesshoumaru studied his captive prey for the panicky rush of gibbering hysteria, waiting for her to bolt as he called her bluff and ground himself hard into her narrow pelvis.

Rin only wanted his hands upon her and yet she had no idea how to accomplish it! The silver being appeared to be studying her acutely, tracing the lines of her body with one of his razor claws. Finally she found that the spark within her had begun to blaze so high and fast that it hurt her; her body ached for the hard, fast use she had been created for. Her Sesshoumaru appeared to be waiting for something, so she took one last deep breath of innocence and bringing her free hand to her chest, grabbed a handful of thin fabric and ripped.

It was enough of a surprise that one of Sesshoumaru's silver brows arched up into his fair hair for at least a moment.

She offered herself like a sacrifice, and dark god that he was, The Beast took her there hard and fast against the bridge between the earth and the heavens. Her hunger surprised him in endless ways and when they both began to peak, the harmonics of his howl and her shriek struck and vibrated the now-dark world in its unseen orbits. When she fell back to Earth, Rin's back was raw and full of splinters. Her long, coltish legs ached from being held in her lover's iron-tight grip as he had pounded into her, showing her in near endless fury what she had needed. Her demon leaned against her, panting in post-coital abandon, long ragged breathes rushing hard against her white shoulder. When she squirmed to get him to release her to the barn floor, Sesshoumaru snarled deep into her sweat-slick throat in a tone the brooked no argument. She submitted and not knowing what was wanted of her, decided to serve her own needs by winding both arms tight under the thick mass of silver strands and brought her face into the side of her lover's own long corded neck. She felt something bloom within her, slowly like the dog briar roses that grew in great tangled masses in the wasted fields and knew it not, because Rin had never known home, but now that it had known her – life would never be the same size again.

"My lord…" she whispered into the silky hot flesh before her flushed face.

She felt the chilling prick of fangs rub across her throat as the demon between her trembling thighs slowly smiled.

~*~

"Mine." He whispered to himself and licked at the sweaty heartbeat before him. Sesshoumaru turned the idea of stopping the fragile rhythm with one well-placed claw over in his eldritch mind and at the last moment, decided to stay his hand. The girl tasted of cold water and human soap, each slow lick of his tongue across her skin lent layer after layer of complexity to her scent, her taste. A fog of iron-smelling blood hit his nose then and instinctively the inugami remembered himself.

Rin felt the demon within her shift and then leave the place she had gladly made within herself for him. She found herself being slid down the rough beam to the dusty floor and felt pain then, approaching on silent feet to explode within her hazy mind, the tiny red explosions trying in vain to bring her back to reality. Splinters lodged within her soft back brought tears to her eyes that the demon lowering her to the barn floor didn't notice. He brought her ankles out from under her, which unceremoniously flopped the girl Rin onto her throbbing back, slipping out a painful whine and spread her thin legs.

She was surprised at the Rorschach blots of sticky maroon that bloomed across the fan of her trembling thighs – what had she done to herself? Fingering a smudge and finding it all too real, Rin wondered out loud to herself:

"Now I have markings like you do, Sesshoumaru." She sighed up in dazed wonder at the demon who was watching her with veiled golden eyes. He never smiled at her but his body's tense stance loosened the smallest fraction; the curve of a straight shoulder drooped, the tight readiness of a leg to flee, relaxed.

The demon Sesshoumaru would have laughed if he could have; somehow this little Rin's ignorant silliness had brought them closer than the act of sex ever could. It was a new experience for them both, this slowly blossoming closeness.

"You wish to have markings, girl? Hnn." Stern eyes brought her up short from her euphoric musings and suddenly Rin was nearly afraid of what she might have said – had she offended? _Let him not look at me in harsh judgment! I didn't mean anything bad!_

Suddenly a clawed finger drew fast against the bloody show of their mysterious union and before she could draw breath to moan at the shrill sensation across her swollen sex, her lover leaned above her and drew his finger across her pale blank check, leaving a dark crescent of her maiden's blood in mimicry of his own. Her huge brown eyes flew wide at the feeling of slick blood upon her face, and the only thought Rin could muster in her shocked, hypnotized state was, "I've never worn makeup before." It was absolutely the wrong thing to say and she knew it, knew it and didn't care.

Rin giggled in the deadly pale face of the demon Sesshoumaru.

He blinked owlishly down at her and allowed it. This once.

Sesshoumaru decided he liked her dressed in her own blood, mixed with his seed and left it to dry upon her young face, but licked the remains from his claw with slow enjoyment.

Finding her slightly effervescent blood very delicious, the pale inugami drew the girl forward by her thin hips and began to lave her body clean. The long rough tongue began on the outside of the inside of one smooth thigh and drew itself in slow laps towards the smoldering delight of his prey's sparsely haired sex. The moaning pants and wordless pleas for his more through exploration of this girl's body that dripped down from her shaky lips were new things to the feasting demon and since it suited his aims to grant Rin her wish, her pale beast delved her wet bloody depths as far as he could with his hungry tongue.

Each slow pass of her Sesshoumaru's long hot tongue up her newly opened sex sent vibrations of sharp pleasure along her sore flesh and Rin couldn't help the rise and fall of her thin hips held fast in her demon's large hands – she wanted only to hold him to one special spot and shatter herself upon his perfect pale face as he swallowed her whole!

She curled up over his silvery head, nearly throwing herself off the unseen cliff her body was racing towards when with one last twist of his tongue within her, Sesshoumaru stopped. Leaning up with limber grace he surveyed his wonton follower where she lay, ruined dress ripped to her small vortex of a navel, the rest of the thin garment rucked up around her splayed, flexing legs in true abandon. The girls flushed, ecstatic face hungered for orgasmic release, her thin, yet thick voice begging him for mercy

She smelled of sweat, straw and of him, wild and bestial. She was _his_.

"Please, please, please…pleasssseee…" she panted, eyes squeezed shut in concentration, trying desperately to clutch at the swiftly fading sensation of his slick ministrations on her hungry body. Writhing on her back, head thrown back in the strewn skeletal remains of last season's green grass, Rin offered herself up to the demon Sesshoumaru without fear or reserve – she gladly was forsaken by her own dull waking world for the dizzying urgency of her body's call, for the flash-burn of instinct which surged through her like a live wire, shooting from her supercharged soul like a firestorm.

He could hear her heart beating hard in his ears and still tasted her blood on his lips, yet still he doubted her desire. She couldn't know what she was asking.

"Please, my lord Sesshoumaru – I love you!" Rin pleaded from contradiction of the cool, deep waters of her heart and the fiery labyrinths of her willing, _wanting _body.

He did not know love but he could not deny her any longer.

Rin heard a low growl from the demon above her, and for a long moment lost herself in the vertiginous swing of the world as it tumbled before her hooded eyes. She felt smooth planks under her hands and knees as she was forced to hold herself up and had but a second to puzzle over the blood stained rough splinters she had slid down so recently and so long ago. Rin mused one last time in introspection that she truly had been another person when these decades-old splinters had come to know her so intimately.

A clawed hand on her shoulder surprised her from her entranced examination just as its twin wound itself in her unbound hair, holding her at taunt attention. Something was about to happen to her. Rin shivered when she felt the first echoes of another presence near her bent-over body and when the demon behind her thrust himself hard within her recently plundered sex with a feral snarl, she cried out in pain and unabashed joy.

Wordless squalls and deep growls echoed up along the high cathedral-like spans of the darkened barn. The girl on her hands and knees whipped her now-loosened hair over her head as she slammed back into the bowed, thrusting body above her. Silver hair slashed in whipping frenzy around the figures as they fucked, to finally pool in a quivering pile when the bloody-eyed demon roared his release into his heaving bitch. As he filled her spasming body with is own, the inugami lunged them both forward and sank his aching fangs into the neck of his captive bitch.

Rin's arms collapsed under her with the sudden searing pain and yet their combined weight was effortlessly bourn by one ivory arm until his body finished. Once sated, Sasshoumaru rolled them both easily onto their sides in the straw.

~*~

She slept. He did not. She was pliable in the soft depths of sleep and so he quickly stripped the remains of her dress and her human life away.

Looping his long arms under her limp legs, Sesshoumaru leaned the girl's sleeping weight forward onto his back and slowly stood. A tiny purring moan escaped from her subconscious to tickle his pointed ear where the girl had lolled her sleeping head against his shoulder.

It was time to go. Shifting his hair back to cover his sleeping rider, Sesshoumaru stepped through the open barn door and into the starlight.


End file.
